Health Care / Medicine

Judge Won't Force Trump To Pay For Obamacare

The 'watch the world burn' plan gets tacit judicial approval.

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As you may know, the Trump administration is engaged in an active plot to undermine the Affordable Care Act, on the theory that what Republicans can’t get done legislatively they can get done by smashing and pouting. It’s the “take my ball and go home” method of government.

Under Obamacare, insurers are required to subsidize the co-payments and deductibles of low-income policy holders, and the government is supposed to reimburse insurers for that cost. Never forget, Obamacare is a fundamentally REPUBLICAN idea that relies and giving private insurance companies handouts, instead of giving the money directly to the people in need of health care.

Trump, eager to burn the whole thing down because the plan is named after a black person, decided to stop the government reimbursement to the insurance companies.

The moral failure of #NotMyPresident is distressing, but there’s a live legal question near the core of the debate. The Obama administration argued that the ACA appropriated the funds necessary to pay these reimbursements. Congressional Republicans argued that the law did no such thing.

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that team #MAGA probably had the better argument. Chhabria refused to issue an emergency order to require Trump to keep making the payments. From the ABA Journal:

Chhabria indicated he was leaning toward the government position. “Although the case is at an early stage, and although it’s a close question, it appears initially that the Trump administration has the stronger legal argument,” Chharbria wrote in his decision.

Chhabria also said that state regulators have been working for months to prepare for termination of the payments. “And although you wouldn’t know it from reading the states’ papers in this lawsuit,” he wrote, “the truth is that most state regulators have devised responses that give millions of lower-income people better health coverage options than they would otherwise have had.”

The problem is that “bad faith” is not an acceptable legal argument.

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Essentially, Trump is exercising a “heckler’s veto” on a duly passed law of Congress. He can’t overturn Obamacare via executive order. Congress will not repeal Obamacare through legislation. The courts will not rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. So Trump is just figuratively shouting at Obamacare until it ceases to function properly.

And the courts can’t really stop him.

Judge denies emergency order to force government payment of health insurer subsidies [ABA Journal]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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